Comment by diskzero
16 days ago
Who does the selection? In the USA, doesn’t it always come down to voter choice one way or another? We typically elect a sheriff but a mayor appoints a police chief. The mayor is elected however. What process could be used to determine process and selection that would avoid voter input?
Open application process. Select whoever had the highest law school grades. Or alternatively make all the applicants take a competitive exam. Anonymous grading.
First you should find some correlation between law school grades and competence of the lawyer.
https://www.alanet.org/legal-management/2023/february/column...
> When looking at on-the-job performance, our internal data — based on thousands of reports from actual attorneys at some of the top law firms — tells us that GPA on average has a 2.2% predictive validity. Meaning that GPA, the thing that the LSAT is meant to predict, explains very little. When we look directly at the LSAT, we see an even smaller correlation of 0.9% on average.
Nobody did a correlational study between electability and judge or prosecutor competence either.
Would you agree knowledge of the law is a better, if still imperfect, indicator of ability as a judge or prosecutor than being merely appealing to voters?
In any case, I think a competitive exam is better than law school grades. It allows for applicants who didn't do so well in law school but got better later.
3 replies →
Who does the selection? Who approves the applications? Who ensures the process is open? It always comes down to winners of elections. The USA isn’t a technocracy or meritocracy, for better or worse.
> Who does the selection?
Of what?
> Who approves the applications?
What's to "approve"?
> Who ensures the process is open?
Put it on a website and in the local paper. Applicants' names, their exam scores, their law school transcripts.
> It always comes down to winners of elections
Sure somewhere in the chain, at the end, there's an elected official. That's democracy.
But elected officials can be required by law to use meritocratic selection criteria to appoint people. Many countries used or still use exams to hire bureaucrats. It's a very old concept:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_service_entrance_examina...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_examination
> The USA isn’t a technocracy or meritocracy, for better or worse.
That's fine but a different argument from "it can't be done".
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Appointment by mayor or local government is fine. Make it a normal public service job. There are reasonable questions about why the US needs quite so many fine-grained local police authorities and who polices the police, though.
Make them fight to the death? Seriously, it would solve sooo many problems.